Category: Medium

It’s a sure sign that your owner is having problems when they bring home a cockerel.

“Look at this handsome guy, Bruno,” he said to me, all smiles and with just a flicker of madness behind his eyes as he stroked at the cockerel’s rubbery head. “He’s gonna get me up. He’s gonna change my life.”

I wagged my tail at him because that’s my job, but I wanted to do was give him a slap round the back of the head and tell him to pull himself together.

He already has three alarm clocks, all of them set at staggered times in an attempt to rouse him from sleep. But they don’t do the job. They go off, alright. They sure as hell wake me up from my beauty sleep. They just don’t manage to sift through into the murky, sleeping subconscious of my incompetent owner.

It’s not like I let him sleep, either. I’m desperate for him to wake up so that he can take me out for my morning ablutions and give me the almighty meal known as Breakfast. I nuzzle him. I lick his face. I paw at his head. I scrabble at his chest. Once I trampled all over the area he’s most precious about, and even that didn’t wake him. When that man falls asleep, he’s dead to the world. Only his own body clock can wake him, and that seems to be set to permanent snooze mode.

His life is falling apart. He’s had a million warnings from work about his tardiness. He lost his girlfriend when she got sick of waiting for him to wake every day. His family think he’s a lazy oaf and will have nothing to do with him. And even though I’m obligated to provide him with unconditional love, he’s really starting to go down in my estimation. The only reason he’s remained in my good books for so long is because he buys the fancy treats with the bacon wrapped around them.

So he brought in this cockerel and I’m all freaked out because, let’s be real, those things look like something out of the Jurassic Park animatronic reject bin. Its face was too small for its body, its feet were too big for its legs, and it had what looked to be the off-cuts of a ballsack attached to its head.

It was the same grizzly scene he’d seen eight times before. A pale corpse, its face stricken with fear and its neck punctured with a green ballpoint pen. Blood sprayed about the room and pooled around the body. And a note, written in green ink on yellow paper, which read:

You won’t catch me. If you do, you’ll come to regret it.

Never any prints. Never any clues. Never a single thing to go on.

Investigations on the pen and paper had drawn a blank. Both were popular brands which had been sold in supermarkets and stationary stores up and down the country for years. Tracing potential suspects was impossible; too many people bought the damn things to isolate any decent leads.

There were never any witnesses. Neighbours never heard signs of break-in or struggle or even the murders themselves. There was never any nearby CCTV to hint as to who had been in the area before and after the crime took place.

The victims weren’t linked. They didn’t know each other or share mutual friends or acquaintances. There was no evidence of them having enemies. They weren’t even alike in appearance or nature. All of them were from completely different walks of life, killed for the sake of killing, it seemed.

And it all left the detective completely and utterly stumped. Victim number nine gave him no more clues as to the murderer than victim number one.

He nurses a glass of brandy while staring at the four walls of his living room.

The house seemed to have crumbled from the foundations up. If there were bodies buried within the rubble, they weren’t going to be easy to find.

The detectives were totally perplexed. It was the only house for miles around, and there’d been no witnesses to give clues as to what had brought the structure tumbling down. Continue reading “Hungry | Flash Fiction”

‘Make jam,’ they said. ‘It’ll be fun,’ they said. ‘You’ll be so relaxed!’

They were wrong.

It was nice at first, I’ll admit. Handing in my notice was liberating. Telling people I was starting my own business was thrilling. And there was something soothing about knowing that, every morning without fail, I would wake up with the sole purpose of making and selling jam out of my own kitchen. No ghastly 7 a.m. commute. No soulless office block and squint-inducing computer screen glare. No staff room politics or having to eat dried-up sandwiches out of a Tupperware. Instead, it was just me and the jam and the radio.

Me and the jam and the radio. Me and the radio and the jam. The jam and the radio and me. That’s it.

That, and a house that smells like stewed fruit 24 hours a day. And throbbing little burns all over my hands and arms where my skin has been bitten by bubbling fruit and sugar. A garage packed to the rafters with empty jars because it was cheaper to buy them in bulk and I was oh-so enthusiastic when this whole shit show kicked off. And all the measuring and the pouring and the stirring and the sterilising and the jarring and the labelling, day after day after day until my mind is so deadened that I could happily jump into a scorching hot vat of summer fruits and sugar and end it all…

The noodles writhe in the bowl like worms. Jeb blinks at them repeatedly, wondering if it’s his eyes playing tricks on him.

“Hunger does funny things to our brains,” mutters the old woman from her armchair. “Eat up, lad. It’s delicious.”

It was hunger that had driven him towards the cottage. Hunger which had forced his knuckles to rap on the front door. Hunger which had made him ask for some scraps. Hunger had which pushed him into the home of a stranger despite his gut squeezing and churning in objection.

Jeb smiles at the old woman, who eagerly shovels noodles from her own bowl into her mouth.

Hunger had already done some daft things. Not much of a surprise, then, that it could make a benign bowl of noodles wriggle like a mound of worms…

Are you tired of the signs of aging? Are wrinkles, sagging skin, and sun spots getting you down? Is your figure not what it once was? Has your figure never been up to scratch? Do you have stubborn fat lurking around your middle? Is your hair turning grey and losing volume? Do you hate looking in the mirror?

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You’ve all heard of Dolly the Sheep, right? Well, our technology is the very same as that used to create the famous Dolly, only more advanced, more reliable, and more versatile.

Here’s how it works:

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Next, we’ll take a small vial of your blood. This the vital elixir which acts as the basis for your brand new body! We’ll retrieve your DNA and use our patented Gene Rejuvenation Technology™ to tweak it, giving you the perfect features you’ve always desired. It’s still your DNA, only better.

Once we’ve tailored your DNA to perfection, the talented technicians in our Growth Lab will quickly get to work on growing a brand new you. Our Advanced Body Growth Tonic™ allows us to mature your cloned body within just three months, rather than years. Think of it like the fertiliser you use in your garden, only for human bodies instead of plants — simple!

The Procedure

Now comes the exciting part.

When your new body has reached maturity, it is humanely slaughtered and prepared for transplant.* The surgery is incredibly simple; we just move your brain from your old body right into your new one…

The monster leers at me with dull, sunken eyes, its mouth agape and spittle smeared across its chin.

Its grey skin is plagued with more yellowing warts than unusual. Its long hair is lanker, greasier, and more dishevelled. I’m sure its hooked nose is more crooked than I’ve ever seen it before.

It’s the last thing I want to look at first thing in a morning, but it can’t be avoided. It took up residence in my bedroom years ago; it’s almost part of the furniture.

I turn away, sick to my stomach, and retrieve my day’s outfit from the wardrobe. Black trousers. Loose grey t-shirt. Black, fine-knit cardigan. Black ankle boots. As close as I can get to an invisibility cloak.

I run a brush through my hair and that’s that — I’m ready. I don’t bother with makeup. Couldn’t bear it.

In the bathroom, I brush my teeth while avoiding eye contact with the monster that lurks in there. It’s a little smaller than the one in the bedroom and easier to ignore if I concentrate hard enough.

There have been times when curiosity has got the better of me and I’ve snatched a glance at it. The shortest of glimpses of its repulsive flesh under the harsh bathroom spotlights — its skin pale and thin enough that I can see the blood pulsing through the veins beneath it — is enough to make me retch…